She heaves him out, throwing Henry a thumbs-up over her shoulder, and shuts the door behind them.
The queen looks over at Alex and Henry, and Alex sees it in her eyes at last: She’s afraid of them. She’s afraid of the threat they pose to the perfect Faberge veneer she’s spent her whole life maintaining. They terrify her.
And Catherine isn’t backing down.
“Well,” Queen Mary says. “I suppose. I suppose you don’t leave me much choice, do you?”
“Oh, you have a choice, Mum,” Catherine says. “You’ve always had a choice. Perhaps today you’ll make the right one.”
* * *
In the corridor of Buckingham Palace, as soon as the door has shut behind them, they fall sideways into a tapestry on a wall, breathless and delirious and laughing, cheeks wet. Henry pulls Alex close and kisses him, whispers, “I love you I love you I love you,” and it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter if anyone sees.
* * *
He’s on the way back to the airstrip when he sees it, emblazoned on the side of a brick building, a shock of color against a gray street.
“Wait!” Alex yells up to the driver. “Stop! Stop the car!”
Up close, it’s beautiful. Two stories tall. He can’t imagine how somebody was able to put together something like this so fast.
It’s a mural of himself and Henry, facing each other, haloed by a bright yellow sun, depicted as Han and Leia. Henry in all white, starlight in his hair. Alex dressed as a scruffy smuggler, a blaster at his hip. A royal and a rebel, arms around each other.
He snaps a photo on his phone, and fingers shaking, types out a tweet: Never tell me the odds.
* * *
He calls June from the air over the Atlantic.
“I need your help,” he says.
He hears the click of her pen cocking on the other end of the line. “Whatcha got?”
FOURTEEN
Jezebel @Jezebel
WATCH: DC Dykes on Bikes chase protesters from Westboro Baptist Church down Pennsylvania Avenue, and yes, it’s as amazing as it sounds. bit.ly/2ySPeRj
9:15 PM · 29 Sept 2020
* * *
The very first time Alex pulled up to Pennsylvania Avenue as the First Son of the United States, he almost fell into a bush.
He can remember it vividly, even though the whole day was surreal. He remembers the interior of the limo, how he was still unused to the way the leather felt under his clammy palms, still green and jittery and pressed too close to the window to look at all the crowds.
He remembers his mother, her long hair pulled back from her face in an elegant, no-nonsense twist at the back of her head. She’d worn it down for her first day as mayor, her first day in the House, her first day as Speaker, but that day it was up. She said she didn’t want any distractions. He thought it made her look tough, like she was ready for a brawl if it came down to it, as if she might have a razor in her shoe. She sat there across from him, going over the notes for her speech, a twenty-four-karat gold American flag on her lapel, and Alex was so proud he thought he’d throw up.
There was a changeover at some point—Ellen and Leo escorted to the north entrance and Alex and June shuffled off in another direction. He remembers, very specifically, a handful of things. His cuff links, custom sterling silver X-wings. A tiny scuff in the plaster on a western wall of the White House, which he was seeing up close for the first time. His own shoelace, untied. And he remembers bending over to tie his shoe, losing his balance because of nerves, and June grabbing the back of his jacket to keep him from plunging face-first into a thorny rosebush in front of seventy-five cameras.
That was the moment he decided he wasn’t going to allow himself nerves ever again. Not as Alex Claremont-Diaz, First Son of the United States, and not as Alex Claremont-Diaz, rising political star.
Now, he’s Alex Claremont-Diaz, center of an international political sex scandal and boyfriend of a Prince of England, and he’s back in a limo on Pennsylvania Avenue, and there’s another crowd, and the imminent barf feeling is back.
When the car door opens, it’s June, standing there in a bright yellow T-shirt that says: HISTORY, HUH?
“You like it?” she says. “There’s a guy selling them down the block. I got his card. Gonna put it in my next column for Vogue.”
Alex launches himself at her, engulfing her in a hug that lifts her feet off the ground, and she yelps and pulls his hair, and they topple sideways into a shrub, as Alex was always destined to do.
Their mother is in a decathlon of meetings, so they sneak out onto the Truman Balcony and catch each other up over hot chocolates and a plate of donuts. Pez has been trying to play telephone between the respective camps, but it’s only so effective. June cries first when she hears about the phone call on the plane, then again at Henry standing up to Philip, and a third time at the crowd outside Buckingham Palace. Alex watches her text Henry about a hundred heart emojis, and he sends her back a short video of himself and Catherine drinking champagne while Bea plays “God Save the Queen” on electric guitar.
“Okay, here’s the thing,” June says afterward. “Nobody has seen Nora in two days.”
Alex stares at her. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I’ve called her, Zahra’s called her, Mike and her parents have all called her, she’s not answering anyone. The guard at her apartment says she hasn’t left this whole time. Apparently, she’s ‘fine but busy.’ I tried just showing up, but she’d told the doorman not to let me in.”
“That’s … concerning. And also, uh, kind of shitty.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Alex turns away, pacing over to the railing. He really could have used Nora’s nonplussed approach in this situation, or, really, just his best friend’s company. He feels somewhat betrayed she’s abandoned him when he needs her most—when he and June both need her most. She has a tendency to bury herself in complex calculations on purpose when especially bad things happen around her.
“Oh, hey,” June says. “And here’s the favor you asked for.”
She reaches into the pocket of her jeans and hands him a folded-up piece of paper.
He skims the first few lines.
“Oh my God, Bug,” he says. “I— Oh my God.”
“Do you like it?” She looks a little nervous. “I was trying to capture, like, who you are, and your place in history, and what your role means to you, and—”
She’s cut off because he’s scooped her up in another bear hug, teary-eyed. “It’s perfect, June.”
“Hey, First Offspring,” says a voice suddenly, and when Alex puts June down, Amy is waiting in the doorway connecting the balcony to the Oval Room. “Madam President wants to see you in her office.” Her attention shifts, listening to her earpiece. “She says to bring the donuts.”
“How does she always know?” June mutters, scooping up the plate.
“I have Bluebonnet and Barracuda, on the move,” Amy says, touching her earpiece.
“I still can’t believe you picked that for your stupid code name,” June says to him. Alex trips her on the way through the door.
* * *
The donuts have been gone for two hours.
One, on the couch: June, tying and untying and retying the laces on her Keds, for lack of anything else to do with her hands. Two, against a far wall: Zahra, rapidly typing out an email on her phone, then another. Three, at the Resolute Desk: Ellen, buried in probability projections. Four, on the other couch: Alex, counting.
The doors to the Oval Office fly open and Nora comes careening in.
She’s wearing a bleach-stained HOLLERAN FOR CONGRESS ’72 sweatshirt and the frenzied, sun-blinded expression of someone who has emerged from a doomsday bunker for the first time in a decade. She nearly crashes into the bust of Abraham Lincoln in her rush to Ellen’s desk.
Alex is already on his feet. “Where the fuck have you been?”
She slaps a thick folder down on the desk and turns halfway to face Alex
and June, out of breath. “Okay, I know you’re pissed, and you have every right to be, but”—she braces herself against the desk with both hands, gesturing toward the folder with her chin—“I have been holed up in my apartment for two days doing this, and you are super not gonna be mad anymore when you see what it is.”
Alex’s mother blinks at her, perturbed. “Nora, honey, we’re trying to figure out—”
“Ellen,” Nora practically yells. The room goes silent, and Nora freezes, realizing. “Uh. Ma’am. Mom-in-law. Please, just. You need to read this.”
Alex watches her sigh and put down her pen before pulling the folder toward her. Nora looks like she’s about to pass out on top of the desk. He looks across to June on the opposite couch, who appears as clueless as he feels, and—
“Holy … fucking shit,” his mother says, a dawning mix of fury and bemusement. “Is this—?”
“Yup,” Nora says.
“And the—?”
“Uh-huh.”
Ellen covers her mouth with one hand. “How the hell did you get this? Wait, let me rephrase—how the hell did you get this?”
“Okay, so.” Nora withdraws herself from the desk and steps backward. Alex has no idea what the fuck is happening, but it’s something, something big. Nora is pacing now, both hands clutched to her forehead. “The day of the leaks, I get an anonymous email. Obvious sockpuppet account, but untraceable. I tried. They sent me a link to a fucking massive file dump and told me they were a hacker and had obtained the contents of the Richards campaign’s private email server in their entirety.”
Alex stares at her. “What?”
Nora looks back at him. “I know.”
Zahra, who has been standing behind Ellen’s desk with her arms folded, cuts in to ask, “And you didn’t report this to any of the proper channels because?”
“Because I wasn’t sure it was anything at first. And when it was, I didn’t trust anybody else to handle it. They said they sent it specifically to me because they knew I was personally invested in Alex’s situation and would work as fast as possible to find what they didn’t have time to.”
“Which is?” Alex can’t believe he still has to ask.
“Proof,” Nora says. And her voice is shaking now. “That Richards fucking set you up.”
He hears, distantly, the sound of June swearing under her breath and getting up from the couch, walking off to a far corner of the room. His knees give out, so he sits back down.
“We … we suspected that maybe the RNC had somehow been involved with some of what happened,” his mother says. She’s coming around the desk now, kneeling on the floor in front of him in her starched gray dress, the folder held against her chest. “I had people looking into it. I never imagined … the whole thing, straight from Richards’s campaign.”
She takes the folder and spreads it open on the coffee table in the middle of the room.
“There were—I mean, just, hundreds of thousands of emails,” Nora is saying as Alex climbs down onto the rug and starts staring at the pages, “and I swear a third of them were from dummy accounts, but I wrote a code that narrowed it down to about three thousand. I went through the rest manually. This is everything about Alex and Henry.”
Alex notices his own face first. It’s a photo: blurry, out of focus, caught on a long-range lens, only barely recognizable. It’s hard to place where he is, until he sees the elegant ivory curtains at the edge of the frame. Henry’s bedroom.
He looks above the photo and sees it’s attached to an email between two people. Negative. Nilsen says that’s not nearly clear enough. You need to tell the P we’re not paying for Bigfoot sightings. Nilsen. Nilsen, as in Richards’s campaign manager.
“Richards outed you, Alex,” Nora says. “As soon as you left the campaign, it started. He hired a firm that hired the hackers who got the surveillance tapes from the Beekman.”
His mother is next to him with a highlighter cap already between her teeth, slashing bright yellow lines across pages. There’s movement to his right: Zahra is there too, pulling a stack of papers toward her and starting in with a red pen.
“I—I don’t have any bank account numbers or anything but, if you look, there are pay stubs and invoices and requests of service,” Nora says. “Everything, guys. It’s all through back channels and go-between firms and fake names but it’s—there’s a digital paper trail for everything. Enough for a federal investigation, which could subpoena the financial stuff, I think. Basically, Richards hired a firm that hired the photographers who followed Alex and the hackers who breached your server, and then he hired another third party to buy everything and resell it to the Daily Mail. I mean, we’re talking about having private contractors surveil a member of the First Family and infiltrate White House security to try to induce a sex scandal to win a presidential race, that is some fucked-up shi—”
“Nora, can you—?” June says suddenly, having returned to one of the couches. “Just, please.”
“Sorry,” Nora says. She sits down heavily. “I drank like nine Red Bulls to get through all of those and ate a weed gummy to level back out, so I’m flying at fasten-seat-belts right now.”
Alex closes his eyes.
There’s so fucking much in front of him, and it’s impossible to process it all right now, and he’s pissed, furious, but he can also put a name on it. He can do something about it. He can go outside. He can walk out of this office and call Henry and tell him: “We’re safe. The worst is over.”
He opens his eyes again, looks down at the pages on the table.
“What do we do with this now?” June asks.
“What if we just leaked it?” Alex offers. “WikiLeaks—”
“I’m not giving them shit,” Ellen cuts him off immediately, not even looking up, “especially not after what they did to you. This is real shit. I’m taking this motherfucker down. It has to stick.” She finally puts her highlighter down. “We’re leaking it to the press.”
“No major publication is going to run this without verification from someone on the Richards campaign that these emails are real,” June points out, “and that kind of thing takes months.”
“Nora,” Ellen says, fixing her with a steely gaze, “is there anything you can do at all to trace the person who sent this to you?”
“I tried,” Nora says. “They did everything to obscure their identity.” She reaches down into her shirt and produces her phone. “I can show you the email they sent.”
She swipes through a few screens and places her phone face-up on the table. The email is exactly as she described, with a signature at the bottom that’s apparently a random combination of numbers and letters: 2021 SCB. BAC CHZ GR ON A1.
2021 SCB.
Alex’s eyes stop on the last line. He picks up the phone. Stares at it.
“Goddammit.”
He keeps staring at the stupid letters. 2021 SCB.
2021 South Colorado Boulevard.
The closest Five Guys to the office where he worked that summer in Denver. He still remembers the order he was sent out to pick up at least once a week. Bacon cheeseburger, grilled onions, A1 Sauce. Alex memorized the goddamn Five Guys order. He feels himself start to laugh.
It’s code, for Alex and Alex only: You’re the only one I trust.
“This isn’t a hacker,” Alex says. “Rafael Luna sent this to you. That’s your verification.” He looks at his mother. “If you can protect him, he’ll confirm it for you.”
[MUSICAL INTRODUCTION: 15 SECOND INSTRUMENTAL FROM DESTINY’S CHILD’S 1999 SINGLE “BILLS, BILLS, BILLS”]
VOICEOVER: This is a Range Audio podcast.
You’re listening to “Bills, Bills, Bills,” hosted by Oliver Westbrook, Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU.
[END MUSICAL INTRODUCTION]
WESTBROOK: Hi. I’m Oliver Westbrook, and with me, as always, is my exceedingly patient, talented, merciful, and lovely producer, Sufia, without whom I would be lost, bereft, floating on a sea of bad thought
s and drinking my own piss. We love her. Say hi, Sufia.
SUFIA JARWAR, PRODUCER, RANGE AUDIO: Hello, please send help.
WESTBROOK: And this is Bills, Bills, Bills, the podcast where I attempt every week to break down for you, in layman’s terms, what’s happening in Congress, why you should care, and what you can do about it.
Well. I gotta tell you, guys, I had a very different show planned out a few days ago, but I don’t really see the point in getting into any of it.
Let’s just, ah. Take a minute to review the story the Washington Post broke this morning. We’ve got emails, anonymously leaked, confirmed by an anonymous source on the Richards campaign, that clearly show Jeffrey Richards—or at least high-ranking staffers at his campaign—orchestrated this fucking diabolical plan to have Alex Claremont-Diaz stalked, surveilled, hacked, and outed by the Daily Mail as part of an effort to take down Ellen Claremont in the general. And then, about—uh, what is it, Suf? Forty minutes?—forty minutes before we started recording this, Senator Rafael Luna tweeted he was parting ways with the Richards campaign.
So. Wow.
I don’t think there’s any need to discuss a leak from that campaign other than Luna. It’s obviously him. From where I sit, this looks like the case of a man who—maybe he didn’t really want to be there in the first place, maybe he was already having second thoughts. Maybe he even infiltrated the campaign to do something exactly like this—Sufia, am I allowed to say that?
JARWAR: Literally, when has that ever stopped you?
WESTBROOK: Point. Anyway, Casper Mattresses is paying me the big sponsorship bucks to give you a Washington analysis podcast, so I’m gonna attempt to do that here, even though what has happened to Alex Claremont-Diaz—and Prince Henry too—over the past few days has been obscene, and it feels cheap and gross to even talk about it like this. But in my opinion, here are the three big things to take away from the news we’ve gotten today.
Red, White & Royal Blue Page 31